Photograph by: PA 20058
, Library and Archives Canada

Inevitably during the Second World War, some of the men who flew in the planes or marched on the ground were captured by their foes. Their war was over, ostensibly. But was it really?

The lives lived behind the wire of PoW camps or in the fields of France, Holland and Germany, evading capture are among the most dramatic and least told of Second World War stories. And many of those stories are Canadian.

Two very useful and eminently readable books are out this season of Remembrance.

A respected writer of military histories, Nathan Greenfield of Ottawa, has penned a detailed overview of the more than 10,000 Canadians caught by the Germans on the Western Front.

And Ted Barris, who, too, has gained a well-deserved reputation for his military histories (17 of them), bores in on the most famous PoW escape of them all. Eighty Commonwealth airmen, including Canadians, crawled out of a 110-metre tunnel code-named Harry on March 24, 1944, in what is today known as The Great Escape.

Greenfield began The Forgotten in the wake of his Governor-General-nominated book called The Damned, which was about the Canadians involved in the battle for Hong Kong at the start of the war in the Pacific.

“I went into it thinking on the whole and in quotation marks, the Germans followed Geneva when dealing with the west, that is to say the Americans, the Canadians and the Brits.

“What I will say, having spent three years immersed in it, is that (assumption) is true on the w...now.” However, he did unearth a number of violations of the Geneva Conventions.

“There were the Kurt Meyer murders and other murders in Normandy of more than 150 men. There were similar murders of Americans and there were the Great Escape murders.”

Meyer was the SS commander who ordered the execution of Canadian prisoners in the days after D-Day. He was tried after the war and sentenced to death. That was commuted to life in prison and Meyer was released in 1954.

There were also violations inside the camps. Men were essentially denied rations and there were cases of men being turned into slave labourers.

At the end of the war, these prisoners were removed from camps and marched across Germany in what are known as “hunger” marches. And the name fit the march literally.

These are powerful stories of survival that Greenfield brings us, often told in the simple, yet compelling language of the men who witnessed this history.

Greenfield says he was particularly moved by one passage written by a man from Renfrew named John Grogan, who was on one of the hunger marches.

On his journey, Grogan bore stark witness to the “death” marches that the Gestapo also led. These were prisoners from the concentration camps — Jews, Gypsies and others.

“We passed a huge wooden crucifix at a wayside shrine; an old Jew had chosen this spot to stop and rest. His body now lay in the snow beneath the cross, a gaping bayonet wound in his chest. ... His white bare feet stuck up out of the snow, and his glassy eyes were fixed on the wooden image of the crucified Jew on the cross.”

These stories peel back the fiction that the German army was respectful of PoWs.

And yet there were moments of surprising salvation, such as the time Hermann Goering intervened to rescue 168 soldiers, including Canadians, who had been plunked down in the Buchenwald concentration camp.

In some ways this was the happy result of a turf war between Goering and Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS. Later, one of the men rescued quipped: ‘I’m one of the few who owe my life to Hermann Goering.’”

Greenfield also unearthed the story of Oblates priests and brothers, who were taken prisoner by the Germans after their ship was attacked. The religious were on their way to missions in Africa, but they ended up in PoW camps ministering to the soldiers. One, Father Phillippe Goudreau, arrived in Stalag Luft III as the Great Escape was being planned and executed.

This is the third book Greenfield has written on the Second World War, his next will see him return to the First World War, which will mark the 100th anniversary of its beginning next year. “I became a military historian slightly by accident and I have found military history absolutely fascinating. The men and women I have met, both who were involved in the wars and the men and women in the academic field, are the most giving and kind and co-operative people you would ever meet.

“The burning passion that these men had for survival. These are not professional soldiers for the most part, they would much rather have been home making jam for the most part and they stepped onto the stage of history and achieved extraordinary things when they did not expect to be on the stage of history. They answered the call. Their sacrifices should be honoured not for military reasons, but for the shsheeruman survival.”

For Ted Barris, his book about The Great Escape was a natural.

“I was typical kid in the 1950s and ’60s who took to these characters. When the film came out in 1963, I remember going. I was 14 or 15 and I couldn’t get enough of it. It was so exciting. It had James Garner in it, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson — all these guys who were idols.

“But it wasn’t until many years after that, that I realized Hollywood appropriated the story and made it its own. The most stunning fact of all was that most of the key players were Canadian. And the irony of ironies is that across my back fence when I was growing up in east-end Toronto was a family named Pengelley and Tony Pengelley, the father in the family, was the chief forger in Stalag Luft III. He was in charge of 107 artists and calligraphers and commercial artists and they were all working on the documents.”

It took a year to fashion fabricated documents so all the 80 escapers went out looking like European businessmen with cardboard briefcases and suits made from their uniforms, Barris, who also teaches at Centennial College, says.

But finally, the biggest reason for Barris to write this book was an obligation he took on long ago.

“A dear friend named Charley Fox, he was a Spitfire pilot, he was a surrogate dad to me when my own father died, the book is dedicated to him. He and I, for many many years were involved, individually and together, in raising the profile of veterans’ stories in print and broadcast.

“He had a ‘to do’ list for himself and at the top of the list was the telling of this story from the Canadian perspective and when Charlie died in 2008, I still had in my hand that list and a big big question mark next to The Great Escape.

“You can’t turn a veteran down. If I didn’t do that, I would feel guilty for the rest of my life.”

This is a story about heroes certainly, but Barris says do not romanticize too much.

He notes that many of the men were officers with university educations; including some engineers.

As well, because the camp was guarded by the Luftwaffe, the German air force, the Geneva Conventions were in effect. The officers were not required to work and there were only two roll calls a day. The rest of the time was the prisoner’s.

And finally, all these guys were “notorious escapers, all these brains together weren’t going to sit and idly watch the war go by.”

The duty to escape is not absolutely explicit in military regulations, Barris says. But there is a duty to help an escape, if one is being planned.

In the north compound of Stalag Luft III there were 2,000 men, including up to 800 Canadians. Every one of the Canadians helped the escape committee known as X Organization, but not everyone was sold on the escape plan.

Several of the men Barris interviewed were glad to help, but they had no interest in trying to escape because “they sensed that they were deficient in language; they realized the distance that had to be covered and they realized the futility of it.”

Very few of the 80 men who used Harry to escape got away. And 50 of them were executed by the Germans.

In the film, these men are shot in one going by a German machine gun.

This is not how they died, Barris says.

“I found an RAF document. It’s 150 pages of foolscap and is a transcript of interviews with the (Germans) complicit in the murders.”

The captured men, wearing their uniforms, were handed to the Gestapo by a war criminal named Artur Nebe. The Gestapo then took the men into some woods by ones and twos and murdered them.

After the war, British military intelligence found, tried and executed these men. Much of their evidence depended on Canadian Keith Ogilvie, who was part of the Great Escape.

Keith Ogilvie, was one of the escapers who got farthest from the camp. “Skeets” was a fighter ace shot down over France on July 4, 1941. Ogilvie got 65 kilometres on foot in 48 hours through the snow and the cold before he was recaptured. He was taken to Colditz prison where most of the Great Escapers were gathered after recapture.

After the war, the Germans insisted that the 50 executed men had tried to escape, resisted and found weapons. They were killed in a gun battle was the German story. Ogilvie, who somehow avoided being part of that group, saw the men as they were led away. They were wounded and they were injured, Barris said. Ogilvie’s testimony led to the trial.

Barris has also found something else that is important and deeply sinister.

In 1942, the Gestapo was given the right to execute recaptured bomber pilots without the knowledge of the Luftwaffe.

Barris believes that the Gestapo prepared a trap for the escapers that allowed them to get out, be recaptured and then killed. It is a sour and murderous note that punctuates this grim tale.

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